I encountered a vulture on the way to work. If you've read even just one other post on this blog I probably mentioned vultures. I meet vultures all of the time. This is not a metaphor.
Today's vulture was standing in the middle of the road, which is often the case. That's usually where the roadkill are. But today was different. There was nothing dead on the road.
And yet . . . the vulture was obviously reluctant to move. Usually (because I've seen so many vultures in the road since I started this job in summer 2018 that I can speak with surprising authority on certain vulture behaviors) they hop / flap / waddle out of the way of cars, then hop / flap / waddle back and resume their meal.
That was the other difference today: just one vulture. There weren't even others up in the trees weighing traffic versus opossum yumminess.
Today's lone vulture slowly waddled first to the right side of the road, then turned and waddled around to the middle and finally waddled far enough into the other lane that I could pass him. (I don't know vultures well enough to tell male from female. I am using the generic "him" mostly because he was an annoying confused pain in the a$$.) I kept an eye on him the two seconds it took to pass in case he decided to waddle back into my lane.
He didn't. He seemed to be checking out the tall grass south of the road, just as he had initially scanned the grass to the north. Did the other vultures tell him there was a delish dead deer somewhere nearby but they were all too full so he should check it out? Is this vulture hazing? It reminded me of the youngest vulture in the old Bugs Bunny cartoon. Beaky Buzzard, according to Google.
This is totally the expression today's vulture had as he peered into the grass. Except it was a black vulture, not a turkey vulture.
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